All of tender hearts need to stick together. We should be the ones bringing the majority of the babies into the world. They might fare better that way. We should know that all of the elbows and sharp corners of the world that protrude out toward our ribs and our shins, as well as the legs that get extended in front of us as we pass are but avoidable booby traps if we've surrounded ourselves appropriately.

Alice Calvery, and her band The New Delta Payroll, cast a gentle tone to the characters -- man-made (like other men and women) and Mother Nature-made (like rivers and love) -- and they glow with some kind of honeyed tint, as if they're imbued with special powers of faith, spirit, life and maybe even a beefed up immune system that would serve anyone well. These folks always seem to be well-suited for any oncoming winter. They've masked their soft skin with a thick undercoating and they appear to have built up a plentiful store of food to last through the roughest of times. Calvery sings them to their places of discovery and vulnerability. She nurtures the sweet Southern textures that they grew up around and into, like a stake holding a young sapling's spine straight during the early years.